Conversational Marketing in a Web 2-dot-over World

I spent the last 2 days at the Conversational Marketing Summit 2008 San Francisco at the beautiful Golden Gate Club in the Presidio. Federated Media put on a great event in a spectacular setting.

Heard from a great line-up of speakers, including Evan Williams of Twitter, Jay Adelson of Digg, Scott Heiferman from Meetup, Richard Jalichandra of Technorati, John Batelle and more. The crowd was mostly marketing and ad agency folks looking for more information about experiential and conversational marketing and how to measure it.

Three keynotes/panels stood out for me: Face-to-Face: Merging Events and Digital panel on Day 1, which went into the convergence of online and offline marketing, Evan Williams keynote conversation with Batelle, as well as The Next Wave of Social Media panel on Day 2. Chas Edwards was a a great panelist as usual -- i loved the moderator's intro of the panel as the "godfathers of conversational marketing." striking!

Great event and content, but the crowd was pretty distracting to me (me not being the target audience and all) -- all potential advertisers and agencies looking to justify their spend on social media mixed with the figureheads of the companies looking to take their dollars diluted from learning anything new about social media. Making money can go from entrepreneurial to crass in a flash, and I witnessed several cross overs. Capitalism ain't always pretty, but it sure is entertaining.